‘Confluentiality’ of progressivism, anti-Zionism
Being that confluence is a biological term, as it refers to the percentage of the surface of a culture dish that is covered by adherent cells, I find myself employing “confluentiality” as a newly created term to describe the flowing or blending together of the thinking, rhetoric and performance of a new breed of Jewish anti-Zionists, and their radical progressive outlook and politics.
These are people who refuse to face the truth while never admitting an error.
Their slogan, “Abolish Zionism” or (in its Iranian version) “Eliminate the Zionist regime,” has been sounded. It is not that states have a right to exist; it is rather that people do. And so, as the cloud-cuckoo-land theorizing proposes, while “a Jewish state has become the dominant form of Zionism … it is not the essence of Zionism.” What is the “essence of Zionism is a Jewish home in the land of Israel … not a Jewish state but a Jewish society, a Jewish home.”
How is that “home” to survive? Throughout the centuries, Jews have succeeded in fashioning vibrant Jewish societies in Babylon, Persia, Egypt and Germany, to name a few locations, and yet the survival of Jews was not assured, at least not adequately.
Zionism, however much Jewish anti-Zionists deny and seek to disprove, is Judaism. The first Jew listened to a call to leave his home and trek to a land wherein he and his progeny would become a nation. Jews, already recognized by Pharaoh as a nation, exited Egypt and their status as slaves with their end goal being a national homeland — their “native land” — as Moses explained to his father-in-law. Twice expelled and denied national independence, they returned from all over the lands of dispersion and exile.
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All this history is not fanciful. It is attested to by documents left by non-Jews and Jews — recorded history in stone, papyrus and parchment. It cannot be ignored or explained away as some sort of European-based settler colonialism that developed only in response to antisemitism.
This inverse positioning of history in the past 150 years rings hollow. Yet they persist and attempt, time and again, to reconfigure a “good” argument from the left to counter any justification for Zionism.
Take, for example, Shane Burley who writes, while trying to downplay the antisemitism from the left, that there is a “coherent campaign” that claims “that anti-Zionism (and any criticism of the movement for a Jewish state) is a covert form of antisemitic hate, once religious or ethnic and now political.”
It is “an article of faith.”
He argues that the idea that “a militarized, ethnocratic state in historic Palestine is categorically in the interest of all Jews.” Meaning, Zionism is actually the Jews’ worst enemy.
His logic continues in that “Israel is the least safe place on the planet to be a Jew.” Moreover, “Israeli apartheid has never proven to deliver Jewish safety, but instead benefits a class who profits from colonial exploitation.” Little safety is built since Israel is imperialistic: “Jews have always been safer in societies that are cosmopolitan and democratic, when nationalism gives way to pluralism, and when Jews build alliances with other people facing marginalization and oppression.”
I would argue that those very alliances being built by liberal and progressive Jews are what not only lead to assimilation and loss of genuine Jewish identity, but also embolden those forces to attack Jewish ideas, then Jewish institutions, and then, the Jews themselves.
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I recently spoke with someone close who lives in Manhattan who related how twice this individual was approached — once by a man and the other time by a student couple. Attracted by the open display of a Jewish Star of David pendant, they attempted to engage on the issue of Gaza, and when rebuffed, became abusive, menacing and even threatening, both verbally and in making hostile motions.
In a book he has published, Burley presents the progressive, intersectional approach, saying the real danger is from right-wing nationalism, and that standing in solidarity with Palestinians and forging coalitions across what he thinks are the “needed communities” will overcome the politics of division and fear. I think the almost exact opposite. I think the danger to Jews comes from all corners and that left-wing antisemitism — from Marx to Soviet Russia, and with too many Jews involved—is the most irrational and, therefore, most egregious threat since it ignites an array of ethnic, cultural and religious groups to hate Jews than the antisemitism of the right.
Burley himself displays some irrationality in an interview in Jacobin, an American Socialist magazine based in New York, where he discusses the subject of Jewish anti-Zionists who have a long history of their “politics … embedded deeply within their Jewish identity” with Benjamin Baltheser. He does so with barely disguised admiration for “how Jews in both the Old Left and the New Left convened their sense of Jewish identity, how they understood and responded as Zionism emerged … and how this model of Jewishness has found its continuity in the radical Jewish activism attempting to halt the genocide in Gaza.”
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Is their Jewishness deeply embedded, or have they corrupted Jewish values, rearranged them just to be fashionable and paraded them out on a walkway of artificiality?
And who are they? He lists “the Jewish section of the Communist Party, the Jewish labor movement, the Jewish component of the Jewish Left and SDS … neo-Bundist Jewish New Left organizations,” most of whom have directly or otherwise facilitated not only an ethereal form of antisemitic thinking but the erasure of Jewish culture, language and ritual, including not a few murders of Jews by Communists dictatorships or through the actions of Arab terrorists they glorify and support.
On Sept. 1, 2020, I wrote here that Jewish “progressives, in lending their support to the radical movements we witness rampaging through America’s streets, in identifying with their goals and, most importantly, in subjugating the interests of Jews to these, they increase not only the probability of Jewish community debilitation but in physical attacks on Jewish institutions as well. Physical attacks on Jews is the next stage.” I do not think events have disproved my prognosis.
In 1910, Jabotinsky wrote of a joint May Day march by Socialist workers in Vienna:
“A group of Jewish workers and apprentices from the Poale Zion party dared to take part in the celebration. They marched through the city with their red banners, the banners had Jewish slogans on them, and they sang Jewish songs. They thought that it was not a sin, since the Germans had German slogans and the Czechs had Czech slogans and songs. But when they showed up at the general Lokal in the Prater Park, one of the editors of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, who was also the organizer of the festival, approached them and ordered them either not to sing the Jewish songs or to leave. ‘Otherwise,’ he added, ‘I cannot guarantee…’ They left.”
That they had to leave has been repeated many times since, all over the world. What we are required to do, ourselves, is to ask where Burley’s enthusiasm will leave us tomorrow.
Yisrael Medad is an American-born Israeli journalist and political commentator.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
